Avelon's Hopes and Dreams

[Avelon 2]

This is what I want my Day Z to be like. I'll be covering a wide variety of suggestion topics; if I happen to spark an idea in you that you think might be a better version of my idea, please post it. If something seems like a bad idea and you have a better one that covers the same topic, please point out the fatal error and post your idea. If something seems like a bad idea but you've got nothing to replace it with, point out the fatal error if you want to but for the love of Armok please!!! do not turn my thread into a debate. Nothing to add = nothing to post, and that's general forum etiquette.

Some of these are direct steals from other survival-horror games with a twist of Avelon juice. No, not that kind of Avelon juice.

Some are originals. I'll mark the steals in case you become so incredibly lustful over a feature that it alone forces you to try the game it's from.

Weapons

1.) Detachable scopes. Some guns have built-in scopes on the manufacturing level; these are actually a minority. The majority of scoped weapons have an after-market or at least detachable scope affixed to them. It would be nice to scavenge a weapon you don't necessarily want to get the scope from it, then add that scope to your own favored gun. (STALKER series, various others)

2.) I'd like to see weapons degrade at a slow rate. Simple gun maintenance (taking it apart and cleaning it) would prevent most permanent damage from occurring, but eventually (if you live long enough) your gun is going to start jamming or worse, misfiring. This could manifest in several ways, detailed below.

2a.) First, gun maintenance. By opening your inventory and right-clicking on your gun, you can 'dismantle and clean'. Optionally, a toolbar item can be required, such as a 'cleaning rag', we'll call it for now. What happens is, your character sits down as though drinking/eating and for the next 2 minutes or so makes a little bit of noise and, while it can be interrupted, will functionally not be able to use their primary weapon. Should you switch weapons or change position, you will have a 'dismantled (XXX)' in your primary slot which does not take any sort of ammunition. You can at this point either 'reassemble gun' or 'finish cleaning' gun. Reassemble takes 1/4 the time of the total process while 'finish cleaning' takes 3/4. Reassemble does not alter the durability; finish cleaning does.

2b.) Durability absolutely must not have a visible gauge on-screen. I don't care how useful it would be. Another context menu selection 'Assess condition' can serve this function, reporting how badly the gun needs to be cleaned and if it has anything visibly wrong with it. It will also tell you what 'quirks' your gun has, i.e. if it jams on the last bullet of every mag, misfires, triggers when bumped, etc.

2c.) As the need to clean the gun increases, permanent 'quirks' (read: problems) of the gun become more likely to manifest. A well-made rifle, if neglected, will eventually start misfiring, pulling (bullets will stray slightly to the side instead of flying true), jamming, and other nasty effects. There is that risk every time you pull the trigger and every time you reload. If your gun is taken care of, the risk is so slight as to be nonexistent. A 0.1% chance of a quirk developing, with 99.9% of all selections being 'nothing'. If you fire that AS50 100 times without cleaning it, a 50% chance of a quirk developing, with a 75% chance of it being 'nothing' and drawing from the list for the other 25%.

Based on guns losing durability as they are fired and jamming when low on durability, forcing a reload from STALKER series.

I'd like some input on that last part especially - I'm fairly savvy but not fluent with firearms and have to admit I don't know how quickly a gun will start to have problems if it isn't cleaned and recalibrated. I'm sure this varies tremendously from one type to another and indeed from one model within a type to another. Reliability may trump raw stopping power in weapon selection, with a high-powered weapon being choice when going into situations where you expect to fire very few shots.

3.) I would absolutely love to be able to carry one extra primary gun on my person, with a hitch: It stays on the shoulder, and your other primary is in your hands. Now, you DO have two shoulders, but doing a fast weapon switch (mousewheel context menu) causes you to drop the weapon in your hands (along with the magazine currently loaded) and grab your other weapon. Switching from the inventory does no such thing, but does show the character shouldering the first gun and unshouldering the second, or shouldering and then pulling out the sidearm.

3a.) I'd also like to see backpacks take a shoulder, but the military backpacks should let you hang a gun on them, visible to other players. Sorry, but I have never seen a backpack tall enough to conceal a Dragunov.

4.) The clip or magazine you're using is loaded into the gun from your inventory and takes the place in the inventory of whichever clip or magazine you load in when reloading. It doesn't just disappear; you have to drop it yourself.

4a.) Loose ammunition of various calibers can be found around the map. They stack into 1 inventory slot up to 10, and if they spawn in a group they can be picked up as a group. A context menu from the inventory 'Load free rounds into magazine|clip' lets you select a magazine or clip, and move as many free rounds into it as possible (until you run out of free rounds or fill the clip). When you run out of bullets, you obviously then do not drop the empty clip or magazine; rather, you must do that manually.

4b.) Gunpowder, slugs, and pellets loot items. That's right, you can pick up the cartridges you ejected from your shotgun and re-pack them.

5.) Tentatively, detachable silencers. There should be suppressors in various designs which will fit different types of gun, as in the real world.

5a.) Potatoes. You can make a temporary silencer by wedging a potato onto the barrel of your gun. It only holds up for a few shots and really only works for pistols. If this goes in I WANT to see it only work on sidearms. Sniper rifles should never under any circumstances come in suppressed variants. And in case you're wondering, yes, this works in real life which is why I suggest it.

Health

1.) Cannibalism. If Humanity is ported over into the standalone, this lowers it. If you are starving and the only thing around is another player, KILL HIM AND EAT HIS FLESH. If a player has ticked you off royally, KILL HIM and EAT HIS FLESH. Carries the same risk of infection as any other meat, restores very little blood, and has a chance of making you puke your guts out that is proportional to how hungry you are at the time you eat it. Flashing? You will make delighted sounds the whole time you're stuffing your face. Red? You won't puke but there's a chance you'll gag audibly. 25%-40%, you have about a 70/30 chance of keeping it down. 40-60%, you have a 70/30 chance of vomiting. 61-100% food, you will vomit.

1a.) The corpse, and indeed, ANY corpse, needs to be fresh. I'm completely up for this being an unrealistically low amount of time (say, 5 minutes to gut it or it's starting to turn). This means you can't just kill people, let them rot for a few hours on the airfield, then run in when you get hungry/everyone logs off/night falls and gut them then.

1b.) Eating human meat several times eliminates the vomiting penalty. I know this will lead to some people making it their only goal in DayZ, but paired with 1a this means they are going to be sitting out somewhere in the open for a moment while gutting. So if you're in a high-population area and someone is doing this, they're exposing themselves. Also, dying resets your immunity to cannibalism sickening, so you'll have to either get really hungry or develop your taste for human flesh again. This is to discourage it being a common practice.

1c.) Please oh please put the player's name on the raw and cooked meat. Trophies, or possibly a gift to their newly spawned self. It's deliciously evil.

2.) Z-Virus. Too much contact with the infected gives you the early stages of the Z-Virus. You will occasionally make zed sounds which alert other players but do not get zed aggro, experience tunnel vision when in the proximity of another player and looking in their direction, and you are slightly slowed and are more fragile. If you don't cure it within 4 hours with a dual round of antibiotics, you keel over dead. If it's within the scripting constraints of the game, you lose control of your character and they persist as a zed in that location until server restart, dropping your gun on the ground and shuffling around like a normal zed. If you survive your first infection (cure it with antibiotics), you're immune and won't get it again on that life.

Important to note: Just because your zombie sounds don't alert zeds doesn't mean they don't come after you if they see you or hear you stepping around them. They will always prefer an uninfected player over an infected one but if there is no alternative, they will happily rip you to pieces just the same.

3.) Morphine replaced by splints for broken legs. Lowers speed, but that effect can be mitigated by painkillers (either partial speed return or a temporary return of full speed) and negated (fixed) by morphine. Splints can be made by harvesting wood and then selecting the wood in inventory to be broken into splints. Creates two.

4.) Fullness. You can't eat more than 3 servings of food at a time and must wait for your hunger indicator to start decreasing again if you gorge yourself. This way, you cannot simply kill and eat 2 cows in a meadow to go from 'near dead' to 'right as rain'.

5.) Make bandages from clothing. Tear up a piece of clothing in the standalone to make 4 bandages. In anticipation of there being a lot of decorative items around, give them a survival use as well plox.

Game options

Things I would like to see put under control of the server; I would like for the following to be the default behavior of DayZ, but of course with the option to change any of this server-side.

1.) You spawn with the clothes on your back and a keychain light. The keychain light has an effective range of 5-10m and a low light level. It will basically illuminate what is at your feet and let you find breaks in fences or doors in walls. It's low-profile enough that it won't really show up from a long distance. This means that finding a torch isn't just an encounter with useless loot.

2.) If skins or alignment/humanity are in some way enabled in the standalone, let the server decide whether or not they want to use the feature. A great many of us do not want the distinction on sight between a player who has killed many others and a player who has not. The perks should also be disabled by turning this off.

3.) Personal or global maps. By default if you mark your map, it should be marked only by you and viewable only by you unless someone picks up YOUR map.

Probably more to come...

Edited February 22, 2013 by Avelon

[CreepySalad 108]

i like all of these ideas.

with the silencers, they shouldn't be too quiet, please. I want a realistic sounding silenced gun, especially considering there probably won't be subsonic ammo sitting around.

I would like it of they'd study up, and put appropriate sound levels in the game.

But it's not necessary, I guess.

I'm rambling. Nice ideas.

Edited February 22, 2013 by CreepySalad

[Jars (DayZ) 63]

I would like dayz to be tough , to the point where it's even possible to die from starvation or dehydration , no matter how much time you spend scavenging for food and water .

Sometimes , you should just get unlucky and die like a fucking wretch .

Hunting should be quite impossible with out some skill and an appropriate weapon ( no axing pigs or cows in the face ) .

Military weapons should be an absolute luxury , only to be used in times of need , melee weapons will be king for taking out infected .

Flouncing around in ghillie suits with high powered anti material rifles ? Probably not . You're surviving an apocalypse here , not playing wargames .

Get rid of third person , it's horrible for astoundingly obvious reasons , in my completely humble opinion , turn off head bob, blah blah .

Absolutely no side chat for fun times and name calling , and letting people know how fat their mum is and what they did to her last night . This isn't happy fun times , I want you to die horribly and alone , as you probably should.

Can't find a weapon to beat off the masses of infected crawling around the shop ? Fuck you , throw tin cans at them or use "tactics" , or die in the bitter cold and driving rain with nothing in your belly .

Spawning with makarovs , maps and compasses ? Hell no , spawn with ravenous hunger , thirst and freezing half to death . You have 20 minutes to find shelter or warmth , or you're a goner .

40+ helicopters ? Shit no , there might be one around ..... might .

Crosshairs ? Not around here , you may just have to actually point that thing for desired results .

There's my hopes and dreams for a game that actually just wants to kill you horridly and leave you to rot , and inevitably will .

[HERBERT-THETREE 44]

with the silencers, they shouldn't be too quiet, please. I want a realistic sounding silenced gun, especially considering there probably won't be subsonic ammo sitting around.

There is no such thing as a weapon "silencer" they are called suppressors

[Clumzy (DayZ) 377]

I would like dayz to be tough , to the point where it's even possible to die from starvation or dehydration , no matter how much time you spend scavenging for food and water .

Sometimes , you should just get unlucky and die like a fucking wretch .

Hunting should be quite impossible with out some skill and an appropriate weapon ( no axing pigs or cows in the face ) .

Military weapons should be an absolute luxury , only to be used in times of need , melee weapons will be king for taking out infected .

Flouncing around in ghillie suits with high powered anti material rifles ? Probably not . You're surviving an apocalypse here , not playing wargames .

Get rid of third person , it's horrible for astoundingly obvious reasons , in my completely humble opinion , turn off head bob, blah blah .

Absolutely no side chat for fun times and name calling , and letting people know how fat their mum is and what they did to her last night . This isn't happy fun times , I want you to die horribly and alone , as you probably should.

Can't find a weapon to beat off the masses of infected crawling around the shop ? Fuck you , throw tin cans at them or use "tactics" , or die in the bitter cold and driving rain with nothing in your belly .

Spawning with makarovs , maps and compasses ? Hell no , spawn with ravenous hunger , thirst and freezing half to death . You have 20 minutes to find shelter or warmth , or you're a goner .

40+ helicopters ? Shit no , there might be one around ..... might .

Crosshairs ? Not around here , you may just have to actually point that thing for desired results .

There's my hopes and dreams for a game that actually just wants to kill you horridly and leave you to rot , and inevitably will .

I like all of those, except there should be a limited side chat with radios.

[CreepySalad 108]

There is no such thing as a weapon "silencer" they are called suppressors

Same thing. They're accepted as silencers even among gun professionals.